1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus, an image processing method, and a storage medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, most apparatuses have the charging method for printing that includes only two kinds of charging, i.e. charging at the time of printing in two or more colors (color printing) and charging at the time of monochrome printing (image attributes in two degrees of color and monochrome).
There is a case where some documents to be printed mostly in monochrome and only a portion to be printed in color which includes, for example, stamps, logotypes, etc. In the case such as this, despite that most of the document is printed in monochrome, the fee for color printing is charged as in the case where most of the document is printed in color. The reason is that in the case where data to be printed in monochrome and data to be printed in color exist mixedly in one output sheet, the color printing operation is performed (that is, printing is performed four times for CMYK).
Consequently, there has been such a problem that the printing cost of a user is raised because even for a document in which the majority of the page to be printed is a monochrome area, the fee for color printing is charged in the case where a color area exists even slightly.
For this problem, the system that charges for printing in accordance with a ratio of color print area included in one output sheet is proposed (see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2002-091743). In this system, drawing information of PDL data input via a network is analyzed to calculate a ratio of color area and charging is performed in accordance with the calculated ratio.
By the method of Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2002-091743, it is possible for a user to know the charging amount for a page to be printed, however, the image attribute and the color pixel ratio of each page used for charging calculation are not displayed on the operation unit of the apparatus, and therefore, it is not possible to know the image attribute and the color pixel ratio of each page.